@dansup @pixelfed The screenshot idea sounds good. To work around the blank picture issue, you could employ similar logic as sites & applications that offer video thumbnail suggestions by scanning the video. I'm sure there's a library out there that can assist, but as I don't use PHP any more I can't name one sorry. Another option is allowing the user to select the story "preview" time code

As an aside, screenshot vs. retain video for author could be a setting configurable by the instance admin

@dansup @pixelfed what if you require og:title style meta data on story entry, and display that to the writer after expiry (im assuming the point is so they know which entry the favs etc are for…)

@dansup
Store key metadata like username, date, story ID, and text caption in a small database table.So that provides context without taking up much space.
Take a screenshot of the first frame of video when story is posted. Optimize and compress image to reduce size. Store screenshots in object storage like S3.For text stories, extract and store first 2 lines of text or 140 characters in the metadata table.

@dansup Develop a simple preview rendering component that retrieves metadata and screenshot from storage and displays it nicely.- Use video thumbnailing tools to generate a preview image for videos. Something like the first 5-10 seconds. Allow preview image dimensions/quality to be adjusted based on storage limitations. Maybe Lazy loading when displaying previews. Client-side caching and a CDN to improve preview load times. Also, replace exact timestamps with relative times.

@dansup @pixelfed Why delete the story?

@dansup @pixelfed
It makes sense that the identifier be a pic since you are a pic app, but it doesn't have to be. You can ask users to create their own text identifier when they post the story.